Quotes About Expression

Abstract is not a style. I simply want to make a surface work. This is just a use of space and form: it's an ambivalence of forms and space.

It takes 65 muscles to frown and 13 to make a smile. Why work overtime?

I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are, what we want to be and what we become.

No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.

Some people think or expect that you should make the same kinds of art forever because it creates a convenient narrative... I want my work to embody my inherent contradictions.

More important than a work of art itself is what it will sow. Art can die, a painting can disappear. What counts is the seed.

It is the melody which is the charm of music, and it is that which is most difficult to produce. The invention of a fine melody is a work of genius.

It is our art that has an opportunity to leave a footprint in the sand. They don't wrap fish in our work.

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

Work for the actor lies essentially in two areas: the ability to consistently create reality and the ability to express that reality.

I had to work out that it was something that could move, without having everybody in spray painted leotards.

One cannot set out to make a work that's spiritual. What is a contemporary iconography for the spiritual? Is it some fuzzy space?

It is something that artists do all the time unconsciously, working in the style of someone they consider a great master. I just wanted to make that relationship literal.

Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations.

Do you know why language manifests itself the way it does in my work? It's because I understand short attention spans.

The work of art is already within the block of marble. I just chop off whatever isn't needed.

There is nothing more marvelous than doing something you love to do and getting paid for it. It ceases to become work, money, and effort; and it becomes fun, your expression of the joy of life.

Architects work in two ways. One is to respond precisely to a client's needs or demands. Another is to look at what the client asks and reinterpret it.

Only the work of art itself can raise the standard of taste.

I work in three shades of black.

Black painters have done all kinds of work. It's the treatment of forms they engage in-that's what determines the value of the work, not whether you call them a black artist or not.

What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.

Poetry is subconscious conversation, it is as much the work of those who understand it and those who make it.

I have as much artistic freedom in my television work as I have in my films.